A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    In 1828 George Cruikshank drew illustrations for Payn Collier's interesting book Punch and Judy. Hay don painte Punch with Hogarthian wit in the year 1829, and Webstei in 1840, portrayed £ Punch in the Country There was a farce entitled Punch as Schoolmaster. Bu the name of Punch has been perpetuated and given a world wide reputation by the humorous journal of that name. Punch, with his long nose and grotesque body—i traditional Italian figure—has become the embodiment o: whatever brutality the English attribute to their nationa equivalent. He is a bad husband, a heartless father, a bad citizen who exercises his evil tongue freely in the field oi pohtics, a libertine who is a bluebeard and a polygamist in one, and finally murders his wife and child and dies on the gallows. Yet the whole performance is dominated by a mood of gaiety and good humour. Among English popular festivals the May Day and St. Valentine's Day festivals deserve to be mentioned. Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses, relates that on the first of May men, women and children in every village go out to the wood and spend the whole night there in pleasant pastimes. In the morning they return with branches of the birch and other trees. Then they drive the Maypole into the ground, which they strew with flowers. Huts are erected near the Maypole, after which the people begin to eat, drink, dance and sing c like heathens '. Of every hundred girls who spent the night in the wood scarce a third returned unharmed in the morning. Towards the end of the eighteenth century London had a notorious May festival at 6 The Yorkshire Stingo ' in the Marylebone Road. The festival was carried on in such an objectionable manner that it had to be banned at the beginning of the nineteenth century. On Valentine's Day, which falls on the 14th February, all [628]